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How-To Geek

You might be concerned with squeezing every last bit of performance out of your machine, or may have compatibility problems between Aero and an application that you are running. Either way you are looking for the simplest way to disable Aero while running that application, and this is it.

You can edit the properties of a shortcut and tell Windows to automatically disable Aero as soon as you start that application, and then re-enable it again once the application is closed.

Simply right-click on the shortcut and choose Properties, and then the Compatibility tab:

Now on the Settings block check the box for “Disable desktop composition” in order to disable Aero the next time you use the shortcut.

If you are having other compatibility problems I’d recommend using the compatibility modes on this same dialog. Note that we have covered Win7/Vista compatibility mode before, but I think it’s useful to point this out specifically.

Comments (30)

This is simply wrong advice for benefiting games. Vista’s composition runs through dx10. When a game requests the video hardware through either DX or OGL, the desktop effects are put on hold. The only time this might benefit someone is if they’re running a DX game in a window. This is the only case where I have seen Vista’s aero to stay running during a game. When any windowed program uses OGL, then aero is automatically disabled.

Doing this for the Eve-online client solved a wierd problem where I would get a nice high FPS (100+) for 5-15mins then it would crash to 10 FPS or so. So worth a shot if you are having any issues on specific games…

HAHAHAHA! After reading this tip I instantly change my World of Warcraft shortcut to disable Aero…And now that I (accidentally) came to this page again…What do I see? Screenshot of WoW properties xDDDDDDDDD

This is a good tip. Despite aero effects being put on hold while running games and therefore not affecting performance, aero has still caused me a number of bugs in games regarding incorrect resolutions being displayed. I was having to manually turn off aero when i played most games otherwise i was getting the display shrunk into a corner of the screen or conversely was only able to see a quarter of the play area. I don’t no if this was also because i was playing through a digital tv via hdmi and tv resolutions caused problems but this tip has saved me a lot of hassle! Nice one!

^^ will apply it tonight, as lately when playing WoW on vista-64 Ultimate SP1, i’ve geen getting appauling FPS when in raids. I have a nvidia 8800GTX, and on XP-32, i could happily play at 1650×1280, with all visual’s maxed out and still get 25-45fps when all hell is being let loose in a 25man raid. However now i seemm to get about 10fps if im lucky and thats when all effects are on low to medium settings :(

For you virtualization weenies (like me), this works around the client screen re-draw issues within the VMware vSphere client running on Vista and Windows 7. Now if only VMware would FIX the client for real, so it doesn’t make all my other windows “ugly” while it’s running… [It’d be really cool to find a way to make this only affect the vSphere client.] Thanks Lowell! ;-)

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and ever since I upgraded it from Vista, I have had nothing but issues. I can’t run Doom 3, Diablo 2, or Neverwinter Nights. I tried to disable visual themes and put in compatibility mode, but it doesn’t work. I don’t know why this happened, but I don’t want to have to sell all these games due to a retarded error.

I would agree with the guys saying this is not needed for fullscreen gaming. Also, if you can’t see it, then your video card isn’t doing it, ya know? You can be running a high performance game in a window, but if you minimise it so that you can’t see it, then your GPU activity should go down to 0%.

Though I have come out of Crysis and Mirrors edge, to notice that windows is asking me if I want to disable aero, because my performance is low…

This IS a useful tip for people who play fullscreen games. When playing Dirt 2 or Aliens v Predator full screen on my Windows 7 64bit pc, the game is often interrupted by a dialog asking if I want to disable aero, because my performance is too low (when it isn’t affected at all). This tip has stopped that happening.

This tip solved my gaming problems! I was going crazy from trying to get my games to run consistently. They would run fine at first, but after viewing a movie on my computer (which I do a lot), the game would run minimized and I wouldn’t come up in full screen. I would have to reboot my computer to fix the problem. After this tweak my games are running perfectly! Thanks for the tip!

My problem is similar, but I am not sure if it is quite the same. While playing WOW I get a message that states, “the digital imager has stopped responding and has recovered”, however after about 3 or 4 times of this the computer dumpes and restarts. There has been a patch for WOW (4.0.1) and perhaps some changes they made have something to do with this. Any thoughts?

Hey Fillan! I was having this problem like two months ago.. And no, the patch would not help you. You NEED to update your graphic card drivers, your directx, physx… Just to fix the problem you’v been having, caused by some thing wrong with one of these 3 options.. At least, solved my problem. :)

Interesting post, hadn’t noticed any issues with WoW myself, but what brought me here was trying to work around the playback bug with the Netflix plugin for Media Center. Would be nice to try this trick there, but the Compatibility tab is greyed out with a note that Media Center is part of the OS. Any alternate way to do this?

Thanks for this! It has solved the issue I had taking screen shots in game (Sims 2). Before, print screen was capturing whatever was behind my active (game) window, rather than the game itself. Since I tried your suggestion, alt-printscreen is working perfectly for me again. (Win 7 Professional) Cheers!

GEEK TRIVIA

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